F-35 aims to shoot first, avoid dogfights

The real capabilities of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – the aircraft that will form the backbone of Australia’s air combat capability – are top secret. But those close to the project suggest its superiority comes from stealth and long-range sensors which enable the fighter to see an enemy aircraft first, fire off its weapons, destroy its target and get out before being detected.

Prime Minister
Tony Abbott
on Wednesday announced 58 F-35s would be purchased on top of the 14 Australia pledged to buy in 2009. He dismissed concerns the F-35 would be challenged by Chinese or Russian rivals, saying it would lead for decades to come.

The military chief of Australia’s Joint Strike Fighter program, Air Vice-Marshal
Kym Osley
, says if the F-35 sensor systems are functioning correctly the fighter should never be involved in an old-fashioned dogfight – but if it is, he insists it handles as well as any so-called fourth-generation fighter. Fourth-generation fighters are those developed in the period from 1980 until the present and include such aircraft as the F-16 Fighting Falcon and F/A-18 Hornet.

The F-35 is a fifth-generation fighter with the added ingredient of being designed for stealth, which includes a low observable silhouette making it more difficult to detect and track.

It is a single-seat, single-engine multi­role fighter under development to perform ground attack, reconnaissance and air defence missions, and is part of a US-led effort to build a multirole fighter for the US and allies such as Australia. The project has had its share of challenges, given it is some six years behind schedule. The US Government Accountability Office warned in a report only last month that the aircraft’s introduction to the US Marine Corps could be delayed by a further 13 months to allow for a full debugging of mission systems software.

Stealth does not make an aircraft invisible, as is often popularly thought, but it does make it more difficult to discern against clouds or distant aircraft, thereby conferring a tactical advantage.

Russians, Chinese unlikely to ‘catch up’

The two fighters most often cited as formidable opponents of the F-35 are also of the stealth generation: the Russian-built Sukhoi PAK FA and China’s own version, the Chengdu J-20.

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And of course the F-35 never has to come up against the plane considered the best air-to-air fighter on the planet: the F-22 Raptor, which is operated exclusively by the US Air Force as Washington has refused to sell it to Australia or any other country.

The Sukhoi PAK FA is a twin-engine jet fighter featuring advanced ­avionics and is due to enter service from 2016.

Little is known about the Chengdu J-20 beyond its limited public appearances since 2011. The twin-engine stealth fighter is expected to be operational by 2019, according to the Chinese government. Its design owes more to the older F-22 than the F-35, and analysts have questioned whether the use of canards (small wings) would cause the J-20 to be compromised by radar, thus undermining its claim to be a true stealth aircraft.

US officials insist the technologies that have gone in to the F-35 have been 30 years in development, giving the F-35 a superior edge for the foreseeable future. However, there were reports the F-35 program was compromised by cyber attacks, allegedly appearing to have originated from China in 2009, which led to speculation this may have assisted the development of the J-20.

Andrew Davies, a capability analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the US fighter is more advanced than any other because the “Americans have been at it for longer". “The Americans are much further down the track in terms of the development of almost any aircraft system you care to name," Dr Davies said. “The PAK FA and the J-20 are no doubt quantum leaps for Russian and Chinese technologies but we have absolutely no reason to believe they can catch up to the Americans in one hit."